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Evans: It's about jobs, stupid

By Clay Evans

Posted:
01/12/2014 01:00:00 AM MST

Back in the 1990s, when the segment of highway E-470 northeast of Denver opened, it became my go-to route to Denver International Airport. Sure, it was a toll road, but it beat the other alternatives -- hauling it to the old Stapleton airport area then, or trickling along a not-so-scenic route through Northminster or Broomglenn or whatever, and a series of two-lane roads.

At the beginning, you had to stop and pay an actual human tollbooth attendant. I was always impressed by those who, somehow, made an effort to be cheerful and engaging.

A few years later drivers were given the option of flying on through courtesy of newfangled license-plate reading technology. But you could still do things the old way and deal with a human.

Now the humans are long gone, as are the toll plazas. Even newer technology reads a tiny sticker on your windshield and bills your credit card in a completely virtual transaction.

That's amazing. But every time I drive E-470 I find myself thinking about those tollbooth humans.

Oh, I know. This is more efficient, by far. It's faster. And in the long run, it's saving money for the public entity that governs the road. And those jobs were, no doubt, stultifying. Still, they were jobs. And as an old Jimmy Buffett song says, telling the story of a street sweeper, "It's my job to be cleaning up this mess. And that's enough reason to go for me."

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Back in the '50s and '60s, a couple of the most famous science-fiction writers on Earth were sure technology would prove a boon for human leisure. Isaac Asimov predicted that robotics and other technology would replace human workers to the extent that "in a society of enforced leisure, the most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!"

His genteel British counterpart, Arthur C. Clarke, confidently stated, "The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play." (Which is why, he continued, "we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.")

Neither man claimed to be able to see the future, though each made some remarkable predictions. In 1945, Clarke literally paved the way to our wireless world with the first description of a geostationary satellite in a magazine called -- wait for it -- Wireless World. But they were wrong about technology and leisure. Instead, automation continually eliminates many American jobs ... and the unemployed don't have enough money to do much playing.

No doubt many tollbooth operators would have preferred something more dynamic. But then, so would many of today's white-collar drones (cue Milton Waddams and Peter Gibbons from the ingenious 1999 movie, "Office Space.")

Still, it's likely that many of today's "chronically" unemployed Americans would take a job, even a less-than-satisfying one, if it were available. According to official U.S. government statistics, in August 2013 the "labor force participation rate" fell to a 35-year low of 63.2 percent (it has since risen, but not by much); for comparison, in August 2008 it was 66.1 percent. Since the recession "ended" in 2009, the change is both surprising and disturbing. Some of it is due to things like Baby Boomers retiring, but some of it is "structural" -- i.e. shifts from things like technology and globalization that have permanently altered the employment landscape.

On Jan. 3, Jesse Myerson enraged conservatives with a piece in Rolling Stone, "Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For." Critics said the list was nigh on communistic and much spluttering occurred in response.

Included on his list were ideas such as government-guaranteed work for everyone and a guaranteed basic income.

"A job guarantee that paid a living wage would anchor prices, drive up conditions for workers at megacorporations like Walmart and McDonald's, and target employment for the poor and long-term unemployed," wrote the left-leaning Occupy leader.

But in a clever and revealing response in the Washington Post, "Conservative Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For," Dylan Mathews tweaked Myerson's language to show that every one of the latter's ideas has been pitched by conservatives, including William F. Buckley and the Mitt Romney campaign. In fact, he wrote, some of these ideas would save taxpayer money.

"If somebody's 40 years old, and not employed for 25 years, that costs governments lots of money, and if we think rationally about reducing spending, maybe it's worth it to pay for their first year at a private employer," Mathews quoted Kevin Hassett of the conservative American Enterprise Institute as saying. "Direct hiring, or a direct subsidy for hiring, could save taxpayers a fortune."

Ah, but this is America, where "morals" too often trump practicality. Ideas like creating public jobs for long-term unemployed or guaranteeing income (therefore, consumers), are nonstarters. Calvinist-oriented Christians and phony "prosperity Gospel" hucksters cast the poor and unemployed as guilty of their own misfortune. Meanwhile, fanatical acolytes of the atheist Ayn Rand assert that every individual makes his or her own luck, and those who don't succeed, well, to hell with them.

That's too bad. Because we could make different choices to help the unemployed -- and everyone else.

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